When Carl Byoir, one of the towering giants who built today's highly
successful public relations business, died on February 3, 1957, the public
relations agency he had founded in 1930 was at the top of heap with 25
major industrial and trade association clients. Five years earlier, The
Reporter had described
Byoir as "undoubtedly the most successful public
relations counsel now in business." Yet 30 years later, the firm was dead,
killed by its longtime archrival, Hill & Knowlton, Inc. H&K had purchased
the Byoir firm from Foote, Cone, and Belding, a major advertising agency.
Foote, Cone, and Belding, successor firm to pioneer Albert Lasker's Lord
& Thomas, had bought the Byoir agency from Chairman George Hammond, President Robert Wood, and other shareholders in 1978 but had
been unsuccessful in managing this public relations agency.

Although Carl Byoir was a major architect and builder of the public
relations counseling profession, he had difficulty in defining the function as
late as 1950. That year he told the National Industrial Conference Board,
"If you were to ask me to define public relations I confess that I would be
at some difficulty because public relations is not like the learned professions. . . . We in public relations are self-baptized." Ironically, The New
York Times headlined his death: "CARL BYOIR DEAD: PUBLICIST
WAS 68."

The rise and fall of the agency that Carl Byoir's talent, drive, and
innovative ways had built demonstrates that in the highly personal field of
public relations an agency is often but the lengthened shadow of a person.

Carl Byoir's "self-baptism" in public relations was a meteoric career
starting as a newspaper reporter at age 15 that provided the broad range of

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